Shashasha EU

On September 5th, 2018, in one of his early Instagram posts, Kikuji Kawada shared a photograph of a poster that read: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." This quote, by Kurt Vonnegut, is extracted from his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, praised as "one of the most enduring antiwar novels of all time." Vonnegut, an American novelist born of German parents, enlisted in the U.S. Army during the World War II, in 1943, when he was 21 years old. Captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, he was taken as a prisoner of war in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was detained. This experience provided the traumatic substance of his novel, but also the somewhat comedic undertone of the style that he came to be known for. His work became an emblem of American post-war counterculture. It seems quite fitting that Kawada would pick Vonnegut's words and make them his own through the prism of social media. He tagged this post with "#kurtvonnegutjr," "#スローターハウス5" and "#なにもかもうつくしく" : "Everything is beautiful." A few hours later, that same day, he posted another photograph: rows of cars in flames in the aftermath of a typhoon, as seen in the news, on a TV screen. The poetic irony of this sequence echoes Vonnegut's quote, and Kawada's entire oeuvre, starting with Chizu (The Map). ［...］